by Siân Evans
The following morning, near dawn, Violet and her fellow survivors saw a Cunard steamer, the Carpathia, approaching carefully through the ice. It had been heading for the Mediterranean when it had picked up the distress calls from the Titanic, despatched by the Marconi men, and had raced at full speed to the stricken liner’s last known position. The crew suspended Jacob’s ladders from the Carpathia’s port doors, and those in the lifeboats with sufficient energy climbed up. Small, traumatised children were winched aboard in mail sacks or ash bags – Violet remembered they looked like kittens. Violet, still clutching the baby, was hauled up in a bosun’s chair. The crewmen who rescued her had to unfold her arms gently in order to release the infant from her grip, as she was so cold. By chance, the baby’s mother had also been rescued and was already on board the Carpathia; she quickly reclaimed the infant and bore it away, without a word of thanks to Violet.
Maud Slocombe, the Titanic’s Turkish bath attendant, had also survived the sinking and was brought aboard the Carpathia. Her recollections of the collision were that she had hurriedly thrown on a coat over her nightdress when ordered to ‘get up on deck’ by one of the stewards. For an hour she awaited further instructions, as most of the officers refused to acknowledge that the ship might sink. Finally, she was put into Lifeboat 11, in charge of a baby, with seventy-two people, two of whom were stewards. This was the last boat successfully launched, and as the oarsmen pulled away across the water, the occupants listened in dismay and pity to the eight musicians left on board playing ‘Nearer My God to Thee’, before the Titanic sank.
In later years Maud remembered that the Italian doctor on board the Carpathia organised brandy and warm blankets for those rescued, but there was hardly any room for the hundreds of numb survivors. The passengers were generous, giving up their cabins to those craving rest and privacy, and donating their spare clothes to anyone who had escaped death in whatever they had been wearing when they clambered or were thrust into a lifeboat. Some women were still dressed in their fine silk or velvet evening gowns; others were in nightwear. The grim mood among the survivors ranged from unassuageable grief to outright hostility. Some of them expressed outrage that ‘these common women of the crew’, such as Maud and Violet, had been saved, while their own husbands had been lost.
When the Carpathia reached New York, White Star officers boarded and forbade any crew from talking to the press, who were clamouring to interview them. There were frenzied scenes on the dockside as relatives and friends of those known to have boarded the Titanic searched for familiar faces among the stricken survivors. The remaining crew were returned to Britain on the SS Lapland. A photograph shows thirteen female Titanic crew members standing, facing the camera, on the quayside at Plymouth. The third from the left is Violet Jessop, and the fifth is Maud Slocombe. They were taken on to Southampton, their home port, only to find that their pay had been stopped by their employers the night the Titanic sank. Needing the money for family commitments, the survivors could not afford the luxury of recuperating from their experiences. Within three weeks of the sinking of the Titanic, Violet was once again on the transatlantic run, working on the Olympic, and shortly after Maud took a posting on a White Star Line cruise to the Mediterranean.
To return to working and living on vast ocean-going ships so soon after surviving the trauma of the sinking of the Titanic doubtless required considerable bravery and resolve. Both Violet and Maud were aware that respectable and reasonably well-paid careers for working women at that time were limited, and that there would be others competing to take their jobs if they refused to return to sea. Women seafarers’ personal circumstances often provided compelling motives for their willingness to face the discomforts, occasional harassments and physical danger that working on ships entailed. Maud earned far more as a shipboard masseuse than she could garner back in London, and she needed the money to support her illegitimate son, who was being brought up by his maternal grandmother. Violet’s wages and hard-earned tips were keeping her ailing mother and younger siblings housed and fed. Economic necessity dictated their day-to-day decisions, so, despite their traumatic experiences, both women put aside any misgivings to resume their careers afloat.
Neither Violet nor Maud was asked to give evidence at the British or American enquiries into the Titanic disaster, which was perhaps a blessing, as it granted them some anonymity in later years. One prominent couple who did testify found their actions on the night publicly criticised, and their reputations irreparably tarnished. The clothing designer and successful businesswoman from London, Lady Lucy Duff-Gordon, had acquired first-class tickets for the Titanic’s maiden voyage, as she was travelling to New York to supervise her expanding fashion business. With her was her urbane and wealthy husband Sir Cosmo, and her maid, Miss Francatelli. The three of them were helped into Lifeboat 1, which had capacity for forty, but which was launched with only twelve people on board, mostly crew members. While they watched the Titanic sink, Lucy commented that her maid’s beautiful nightgown had been lost. Understandably, this insensitive remark angered the sailors in the boat, who had lost both their shipmates and their livelihoods in the catastrophe. To calm them, Sir Cosmo offered to give them £5 each in compensation, so that they could buy new kit and clothes, but after they were rescued by the Carpathia and he was seen writing cheques to each of the sailors, malicious rumours circulated that the Duff-Gordons had bribed the occupants of Lifeboat 1 to ignore the cries for help from those drowning, in order to ensure their own survival. It was a complete fabrication, but the slur dogged the couple for the rest of their lives.
The Titanic was a colossal disaster, covered worldwide in the press. In the first week after the sinking, the New York Times alone dedicated seventy-five pages to coverage of the story. For those looking for a moral, the calamity smacked of hubris, a metaphor for the end of the expansionist, confident, entrepreneurial mood of the Edwardian era. Sir Osbert Sitwell, later recalling the changing atmosphere before the cataclysm of the Great War, saw the sinking of the ship as ‘a symbol of the approaching fate of Western Civilisation’.4
Despite its brash emphasis on speed and its apparent reliance on technological wizardry, the Titanic fell victim to multiple human errors coupled with poor judgement. It flaunted all the trappings of opulent luxury for those who could afford it, but the sinking of the great ship on its maiden voyage across the Atlantic came to be seen as the moment harsh reality collided with the belle époque ideal of the Edwardian era. The brazen disparity in personal wealth exemplified by the ship also made uncomfortable reading for those with more egalitarian principles. It was reported that a de luxe suite on the Titanic cost $4,350, approximately $70,000 today. By contrast, the younger of the two Marconi men on board, Harold Bride, was paid a mere $20 a month. Without his determination to continue transmitting distress messages until the ship sank, the 706 souls eventually saved by the Carpathia might also have perished.
There was international public outcry about the injustice of how the 1,517 dead passengers and crew met their ends. Most of the 885 male crew members came from Southampton; 693 of them were lost, which was a devastating blow to a single city, and there was hardly a working-class home in the port unaffected by the tragedy. There were 201 survivors from the 324 people travelling in first class, and 118 of the 277 in second class, but only 181 survived from the 708 in third class. Although both official enquiries concluded that there had been no discrimination against third-class passengers, two witnesses testified that crew members had barred them from climbing to the upper decks where the lifeboats were housed during the crucial hours between the collision and the ship’s sinking.
There were immediate repercussions for the travel industry, with a new emphasis on safety. Cunard reminded its captains that icebergs were a danger to all vessels on the North Atlantic in the spring, when increasing temperatures could cause ice floes to break away and float eastwards into shipping lanes. Better methods of safely launching lifeboats from listing ships were develop
ed, including a design for an improved davit, the patent for which was filed by the author’s great-great-uncle, Cunard Chief Officer Stephen Gronow. The number of lifeboats provided on the Olympic, Titanic’s twin, was increased overnight from twenty to sixty-eight. In future, lifeboat places were guaranteed for all on board, and practising lifeboat drill became an essential part of the voyage. All vessels carrying more than fifty passengers had to be equipped with long-range, permanently manned Marconi sets, which should be staffed round the clock so that vital messages and distress signals could not be overlooked. Watertight compartments were introduced throughout the hulls of existing and new ships, to limit the ingress of water and prevent the rapid flooding that had caused the Titanic to sink.
Following the demise of the White Star Line’s flagship, all the rival shipping companies were keen to stress their vessels’ safety and reliability, to woo back nervous passengers who had read the gruesome news coverage and the sobering findings of the official enquiries. It was vital to reassure the paying public – particularly female passengers, who were deemed to be naturally more trepidatious – and the lessons learned from the loss of the Titanic were incorporated into the design of Cunard’s next ship, the Aquitania, launched in 1914.
The Aquitania was already under construction at the John Brown and Company works on Clydebank when the Titanic was lost in 1912. As a result, the structural design was substantially modified to include new safety features, and consequently the ship took more than three years to complete, being delivered in May 1914. The new ship had a double hull, and watertight compartments so that it couldn’t sink as the result of a simple collision. It was the largest ship yet, half as big again as the Mauretania, and boasted four funnels and four direct turbines. The accommodation was 618 in first class, 614 in second and 1,998 in third class. The ship consumed 880 tons of coal per day, and had an average speed of twenty-three knots (about twenty-six miles per hour). It was fitted with Frahm’s anti-rolling tanks to add stability to its performance in rolling seas, and it was the first Cunard ship to boast a permanent swimming pool.
This new Cunarder was the first vessel to become known as the Ship Beautiful. Her exterior was a triumph of marine engineering, while the ‘backstage’ elements of the ship, the places where only crew or officers would normally go, were the acme of the industrial aesthetic – hard-edged, functional, clean and compact. The Aquitania was particularly designed to be ‘safe’, and the company reiterated this word in its publicity material to attract and reassure passengers: ‘The ship is fitted with all the latest safety appliances that facilitate safe navigation, and the great army of lifeboats includes two motor boats fitted with wireless … the Aquitania answers in supreme degree the requirements of safety, seaworthiness, luxury and comfort.’5
The public spaces and staterooms were deliberately designed to appeal to women. Arthur Davis, architect and designer, was briefed by Cunard that his role was to disguise from the first-class passengers – especially the female ones – the essential but unpalatable truth that they were on a huge vessel, afloat on an even vaster ocean, with all the attendant risks and discomforts. The greatest amenities and comforts to be found in the plushest hotels in America and Europe, such as the Waldorf-Astoria or Ritz-Carlton, were to be deployed on board, while the aesthetics should mimic reassuringly grand, long-standing, reliably terrestrial settings, in defiance of the maritime realities to be observed through any porthole. Davis recalled:
I said to the directors of the company that employed me: ‘Why don’t you make a ship look like a ship?’ … But the answer I was given was that the people who use these ships are not pirates, they do not dance hornpipes; they are mostly seasick American ladies, and the one thing they want to forget when they are on the vessel is that they are on a ship at all. Most of them have got to travel and they object to it very much. In order to impress that point upon me, the company sent me across the Atlantic. The first day out I enjoyed the beautiful sea, but when we got well onto the Atlantic, there was one thing I craved for as never before, and that was a warm fire and a pink shade.
The people who travel on these large ships are the people who live in hotels; they are not ships for sailors or yachtsmen or people who enjoy the sea. They are inhabited by all sorts of people, some of whom are very delicate and stay in their cabin during the whole voyage; others, less delicate, stay in the smoking room all through the voyage … I suggest to you that the transatlantic liner is not merely a ship, she is a floating town with 3,000 passengers of all kinds, with all sorts of tastes, and those who enjoy being there are distinctly in the minority. If we could get ships to look inside like ships, and get people to enjoy the sea, it would be a very good thing; but all we can do, as things are, is to give them gigantic floating hotels.6
Cunard deliberately cultivated its American clientele, who represented 80 per cent of first-class passengers on its Europe-bound ships, and the Aquitania was labelled the Ladies Ship. Advertising stressed the convenience, safety and comfort to be found on board. Elite passengers were provided with a restaurant, grill room, drawing room, smoking room, lounge, a grand foyer, numerous salons and writing rooms, as well as the swimming pool and a gymnasium. There was even a garden lounge and a Historical Gallery of Art. Cunard was keen to stress a noble and venerable cultural history; the staterooms and first-class public spaces, such as restaurants and ballrooms, were designed to match the high expectations of seasoned hotel guests and regular international travellers. The liner was presented as the epitome of Ritzonia, a blend of the name of the hotel chain with the ‘ia’ ending that provided the distinctively sonorous names of each of Cunard’s ships, all taken from ancient Roman provinces.
The second-class accommodation boasted three features usually available only to first-class passengers: a verandah café, gym and lounge. There was also a spacious dining saloon, drawing room and smoking room. The third-class quarters, while more utilitarian, provided large public rooms with specially designated open and covered decks and were a great improvement on the usual horrors of steerage.
In the public rooms and shared spaces the illusion was maintained that the passengers were guests staying in an aristocratic country house, one that reflected the spectrum of historical styles that might be found in a centuries-old mansion on terra firma. Anachronistic linenfold panelling and ornate marble fireplaces might seem incongruous in a massive steamship pounding across the ocean, but they gave a reassuring sense of solidity and reliability to the apprehensive traveller. Queen Anne-style libraries, Jacobean smoking rooms or Tudor grill restaurants, Georgian-inspired colour schemes, touches of faux Grinling Gibbons, with figured carpets and heavy velvet curtains recalled the familiar style to be found both in the Ritz and the private homes of millionaires. The air of opulence and tasteful entitlement was augmented by potted palms and ornate flower arrangements. These elements distracted the passengers from the truth, that they were travelling in a huge mechanical behemoth across thousands of miles of unknowable, volatile ocean.
The inaugural voyage of the Aquitania began at Liverpool on Saturday, 30 May 1914. There were only 1,055 passengers on board despite a total capacity of 3,200. Queasy superstition was now attached to the maiden voyage of an ocean liner. However, 2,649 had booked tickets for the return trip from New York. One of the passengers on the outbound journey, writing anonymously as ‘W.A.M.G.’, gave a jovial account of their departure in ‘The Diary of an Aquitanian’: ‘Liverpool’s crowd cheers and a flotilla of tugs and larger craft salute Britain’s largest liner. We settle down to life on an ocean without waves. Much ado about cabins. The Cunard officials give a gyroscopic display of “suaviter in modo”; interpreted into the language of the Atlantic, this means every passenger gets the best cabin on the ship – result, excellent dinner eaten.’ He commented on the stability of the ship, the outbreak of affability between the passengers, with new friendships being fostered over games of quoits, and he hints at romance developing between some of the younger passengers
, with discreet dalliances on the boat deck after dark.
His account appeared in the ship’s daily newspaper, the Cunard Daily Bulletin, which was distributed for the information and enjoyment of the passengers. It sold at two and a half pence, or five cents, and was compiled and printed on board overnight. The paper contained illustrated adverts for attractions such as Liberty’s department store and high-end furriers in London, the Adelphi Hotel in Liverpool, and art dealers in major cities. The Bulletin provides a fascinating snapshot of the perceived interests of the moneyed passenger in the summer of 1914. One advert was particularly likely to appeal to any female traveller wary of thieves. The Keptonu Treasure Garter was a small chamois leather money belt, like a discreet purse, which could be held in place on the lower leg by a band of elastic, fitting just below the woman’s knee. In an era of full-length skirts, this handy accessory was designed to keep a lady’s valuables and jewellery safely out of reach of pickpockets, unless of course they were to start at one’s ankles. Also featured in one issue was a transparently sycophantic photo showing two achingly fashionable young women at a racecourse, captioned ‘Miss Nancy Cunard and Lady Diana Manners … two of the prettiest and most popular of the younger generation in English society. Lady Diana is the youngest daughter of the Duke of Rutland and Miss Cunard is a descendant of the founder of the Cunard Line.’ As might be expected, stories about travel featured strongly. An interview with M. Louis Blériot, the pioneering French pilot, elicited his startling belief that transatlantic flight was almost within his grasp: ‘Perhaps some day aeroplanes will be as commonplace as motor-cars are now,’ he predicted. In another article, M. Blériot’s great rival, Count Zeppelin, described his magnificent new airship, which was under construction in Germany, and stated that he would attempt the first transatlantic flight in it in 1915.